Neon City Riders is a 2D action-adventure game where you can explore at will the whole Neon City in search of items, abilities and companions that help you finish your quest.

Now, picture yourself in a not so distant cyberpunk/nu-wave future where almost everyone in your city was forced to be part of a gang and dragged into a turf war that have broken the equilibrium of the whole metropolis and his habitants. Apparently the only way to restore this balance is to go deep into each one of the gang turfs and defeat their leaders to unify the city and its people once again.

What to expect about this game? Action, puzzles, memorable characters, colorful areas, cyberpunk thematic, nu-wave aesthetics and soundtrack, upgrades, items and much more! (extra info in the features section below).

Some of our main inspirations for this game are The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Hyper Light Drifter, Earthbound, Metal Slug 3, Final Fight, Fallout 3 and Resident Evil. So, if you like any of this games, you'll probably love this one!.

Across the city you will find a lot of people to interact with. Some of they share you ideals of unification and peace, some others seek chaos and mayhem. Here is a quick peek of them.

RICK

The protagonist of the game, the unselfish hero. You will play the rol of this rad dude that even with his rough appearance is ready to give everything to unify his city and to bring peace once again to his people.

EVERGRAY

Your self-called mentor. Evergray is an experienced inhabitant of the Neon City that shares, seeks and worships the same ideals than you. His vast experience will be pretty useful for your journey!.

THE RAMEN CREW

Even with the city upside-down the people needs to eat, and that's when The Ramen Crew brothers step in. They are always ready to provide a comfort zone filled with delicious food in every corner of the city. Of course, for a fixed price.

After the start of the turf wars, the whole city was forced to fragment into gangs. Every territory is delimited by violence, also their resources and people within belongs to the boss of each crew.

THE AUDIOBATS

Making use of their super-human abilites to control electricity and audio waves, this crew has taken power of the west side of the city. Despite the violence they use to control their turf, their main goal is to preserve and restore the art (specially the music) of this decaying city.

UNDEAD LASER RAVENS

Blessed (or cursed) with psychic powers, the ULR is committed to research everything about their mighty skills in order to replicate them for the benefit of humankind and the growth of the mass knowledge.

MUTANT SCALE BROTHERHOOD

Acceptance and respect are the main objectives of this bunch of this creatures victims of the pollution and arrogance of the former society. This mutations granted them with thick skins and venomous fluids; and eventually rewarded them with the south side of the Neon City.

RUSTY EAGLE WARLORDS

Not long after a technological pinnacle, the society experimented a quick economic downhill that ended in the fast accumulation of useless robotics and damaged utopian structures. Even when their time on the top was little, the cyborgs learned enough data and intelligence to create their own sub-society and seize the east side of the city. Now they just try to survive and encapsulate their kind into their turf.

In order to finish up your quests, unlock new areas and beat up your enemies you need to find a bunch of items and abilites hidden in the whole city and figure out how and when to use them. The mastery of your skills is key to progress in your mission.

BURGUER

Recovers 50% of your HP bar.

RAMEN

Recovers your full HP bar.

SODA

Allows you to use ilimited ammount of Mana during a short period of time.

PIZZA

Recovers 2 hearts of your HP bar.

SKULL BASH

Summon the skull power into your shoulder pad to open your way through the city.

TEMPERED ARMOR

Create a crystal clear box to avoid damage for a short period of time.

UNDERFIELD

Allows you to see things normally invisible to the naked eye.

ECHO STRIKE

Reflect enemy projectiles back at them.

Explore the whole city at will while unlocking new maps and districts in the order you choose.

Interact with a society divided in gangs where each one of them possess unique superhuman powers.

Obtain new abilities and items to help you reach new places and complete areas with ease.

Defeat a great variety of enemies at high-paced action using ability strategies and even the environment.

Solve puzzles and riddles to test your intellect and keep on going in your adventure.

Relax, plan and talk to your crew members in your own hideout located in a warehouse on the neon district.

Enlarge your gang by recruiting new members that unlocks you options, tools and features to help you with your quest.

Save time with the fast traveling option available from already discovered checkpoints while riding a cool floating-board!.

Change the course of the story by completing some quests and getting special items.

Enjoy the Nu-wave/Jazz-hop soundtrack filled up with nostalgia, action and drama all wrapped up exclusively in 16-bit era style instruments (Genesis/SNES) to achieve an old-school city ambiance.

We're a mexican indie game development studio created in 2016, and although we are relatively new, our team possesses plenty experience, so we trust we are able to create fun, aesthetic and transcendent products developed from a player's view who appreciate the main values in the video games!

We love to invest all our creativity, time and brains on every project we participate by taking advantage of our expertises in graphics, design, coding, sounds and music. Our main goal is that you enjoy every minute of our home-made games filled with tons of details and love.

JORGE GARCÍA(pogo8bit)

Founder, Direction, Managment, Coding, SFX and Music

“With more than 10 years of experience in programming, design and music development; and almost 26 years of playing video games is safe to say I have pretty much an idea of how a quality video game should be!, now is the moment to focus all my time and efforts to make it happen in our titles.

Also, I’m committed to take advantage of the opportunity that indie devs have right now to success with the only support of the global gamer community, reason why I left my comfort zone and quit my jobs to finally develop projects that fulfill my expectations”.

HÉCTOR SÁNCHEZ(MASIOSARE)

Backgrounds, Pixel Art & Movement Animation

“After working out some projects of music, and video game streamings with this team I decided to help with the graphics and design to also improve my experience in pixel art.

Now I see this as an opportunity to reflect my love for games, horror movies, music and pop references into my work on this developments”.

JOSUE HERNÁNDEZ(GROTESCO)

HUD, Pixel Art & Detail/Particles Animation

“My biggest inspiration for my designs are video games, cartoons, retrofuturism and fashion. I started dipping my toe into pixel art a few years ago while experimenting with poster design styles.

Some of my favorite games are Earthbound, Fallout and Bioshock and I think my art style has been heavily influenced by old games like Harvest Moon, Mother series and Kirby which I was obsessed with when he was a kid.

I enjoy obnoxiously loud colors and adding sparkles to EVERYTHING!.”.

Everyone in the studio got plenty experience with videogames, specially playing them, and luckily for us we have had the opportunity to enjoy hundreds of titles across different generations, and something that we found pretty appealing is the capability of certain games to be an excellent product without depend or abuse from a certain resource and achieving it almost exclusively through their concept and mechanics.

Thanks to the popularity of crowdfunding and the access to new technologies, it is now much easier the comunnication between people who share our viewpoints, hobbies and objectives, allowing us to create and develop together new ideas and concepts, in this case a video game. So, taking this into consideration it was very natural for us to quit our current jobs to focus 100% to create our dream studio and begin to contribute and give back to this media so important for us.

In Neon City Riders we want to create, along with you, a city that feels organic, familiar and highly explorable. A place where you can develop your adventure at will, and where despite having a well defined objective since the beginning, you could choose the own path to fulfill it. Here the exploration plays a very important role to get the most of this story, characters, objects and abilities. This way, we can create together a video game with an strong decision making freedom, so you can choose to just follow the critical path of the adventure that will lead you to an "on rails story" or invest some time in explore every corner of the city to obtain different rewards that will reflect on the features you can use and even change the course of the main story.

The first thing we defined was the contextual concept, which we decided to fuse the urban aesthetics of New York gangs during the 70's and 80's with science fiction concepts, specifically cyberpunk. After that we were adding more ideas like the use of supernatural abilities, the division of turfs and the identity of their gangs, the correlation of your new skills and their mechanics to unlock areas and to destroy enemies more easily, the relationship of the city and its inhabitants with you and how these connection allow you to unlock new features, and finally add a simple but deep story filled with a charismatic cast, moral drama and good sense of humor.

For this project we got inspired by some of our favorite games like Link’s Awakening, Hyper Light Drifter, Mother series, Final Fight series, Fallout 3 and even the dynamics of Resident Evil to name some. And thanks to this influence and your feedback we will be able to build our own identity and concept which we know it will be appealing to you and get you into invest many hours enjoying this city, its inhabitants and its mechanics.

We have been working on this game from March of this year, and we currently have a free playable demo which we encourage you to download it. But we yet need to develop a deeper story, more characters and enemies, level design flowcharts, full soundtrack, tons of pixel art and of course, all the coding in between. According to the time we've spent on this project, we plan to release the game on the first quarter of 2018. We are currently developing the game for PC, OSX and Linux, and if we reach to the stretch goal, we will also release it to the comfort of console gaming in PS4.

By supporting this kickstarter campaign you are not only developing this game along with us, but also giving us the opportunity to establish our dream studio and improve our team to continue reaching our main goal, which is to create quality games designed and developed collectively from the point of view of players who love to unravel, criticize, improve and rescue the basic values of video games to merge them with modern, fun, aesthetic and transcendent themes and concepts! Thank you very much for supporting this project and being a part of this indie studio, we will be updating the information about Neon City Riders very soon!.